The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Monday, March 25, 2013

The hummingbird and the rat

What’s the point, you ask, sether, what’s the point of all
this?You think you might become a
Mormon.Or a Baha’í.They’ve got some traction.They know how the world should be.You, Brother Jero, you just rabbit on
interminably about demons.And they’re
not even proper demons, red hot with anger, butting you up the bum with their
pointy horns, lacerating you with their tridents. They’re loci of irreducible difference.

There aren’t many laughs in that, Brother
Jero.What’s the point?

The point is, sethren, we are possessed.The question we have to ask is, look, we are
the most intelligent beings on Earth, possibly in the universe, or at least
this universe; how come we are so fucking stupid?Look at any area of the globe, big or small, land
or ocean, and you realise that something about our behaviour stands out, above
all other species.Sheer blind
stupidity.It’s not our only quality I
grant you.We are also amazingly creative
and constructive, we have built cities and spaceships, art, music, and society,
all miraculous achievements.It’s not
that I’m on about.It’s the other stuff.

Take fish.The oceans
are a gift from eternity, powered by the sun, filled with evolved life over three
and half billion years, an almost inexhaustible reservoir of protein and
beauty.And we are methodically,
self-consciously, turning those oceans into squalid sumps.Collectively, not very bright.Collectively, the seven billion of us, we
have less perspicuity than a whelk.Why?Particularly why if, as is
the case, we are so fucking brainy?

And
that is the point, sethren.We are like
that because we are possessed.Not by
evil spirits.But what we are is not
quite what we think we are.What is in
our heads, the “thoughts” and “beliefs” and “philosophies” and “principles” are
not wholly us at all.Nor are they all
that interested in our welfare as a species.If at all.In fact they are not
interested in anything, because they are insentient, mindless, subject to blind
evolution, just like the humming bird and the rat.And us.But they are not alive, though they evolve like life.They survive because they are at an instant better
suited to a particular niche than their competitors.Instantaneous survival, that is the sole
bridge they have to cross.Opportunism
in the shortest possible term; if successful, reiterated indefinitely, from
second to second for minutes, centuries, millennia.Like a bag, or a knife.Or what you said at 3.27pm the Tuesday before
last, if you were talking at that precise time.

And when I say they,
sethren, what am I referring to?You’ve
got it.Those demons again.

I’m not saying, sethren, that we as a species have no
foresight.Clearly inestimable foresight
is what distinguishes us from all
else.Capitalism, town planning, space
travel.But these are all evolved too,
quasi-infinite alliances and alliances of alliances of demons. And they evolved through instantaneous
opportunism, instantaneous selection, instantaneous survival.Our huge success in catching fish, from the
sprat to the whale, is equally evolved.And if you read St Richard’s Climbing
Mount Improbable, a point he makes most cogently is that evolution, if it
takes a wrong turn, can never turn round and go back to the branch where this
track was taken in error, and take the more promising way.No more can a stone roll up a hill.Evolution can only go on the way it’s going,
instantaneous success by instantaneous success or, if success fails for an
instant, death.Death is okay when there
are thousands or millions more of the same thing, like whatever it was you said at 3.27pm the Tuesday before
last, if you were talking at that precise time..But if too many die, we’re still talking
about demons here and alliances of demons, that means extinction.And demons rely on things in the world to
survive.Fishing cannot go on without
fish.So, it seems, our fishing will go
on blindly, you cannot deny that it looks blind, blind and stupid, until there
are no more fish.Then it will become,
instantaneously, extinct.

Hold on a minute, you might say.That’s not going to happen.Other
alliances of demons are evolving, as it might be marine conservation areas.

That is the point too, sethren.Evolution works for good as well as ill.But it is hugely complex, and it might help
if we understood it a bit more.What
does not work, or very seldom, and often only by very lucky chance, is supposedly
superordinate plans.Look at our present
government.Okay, sether Albert, it is
more gracious to refer to “the intellectual deficit issue” rather than the biggest
bunch of idiot fuckwits ever gathered together in the Mother of Parliaments, but
I grant you the point remains the same.They think they have a plan.And
I am not one who has time for essences, for Platonic Forms.But yes, their plan looks like the essence of
human stupidity.A steady progression of
instantaneous selection, survival, reiteration of alliances of demons which,
when we look at their shape in the world, we might think were better
extinct.But that’s not the way the
evolution of culture works.We may love
the whale and Nelson Mandela, but Hitler and the herpes virus were, still are,
in evolutionary terms much more successful than lovingkindness for the whole human species.

That is why it might be a better course for governments to
look at what is good in political economy, and encourage it, and look at what
is bad, and try to minimise it, rather than to have plans.But such a course is a long way from where we
are at the moment.To get there it might
help us if we understood what we are are and why.How it is that we can be so intelligent, and so stupid?

And to understand that, sethren, we have work to do.Tomorrow, for one day only, we’ll tie up
demons.Then onward.But for now… Can anyone smell bacon?

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.